The Materiality of Administration

The seals and seal impressions from Hierakonpolis

The cultures
of the Lower Nile Valley transformed into one of the world’s earliest complex
societies during the last millennia BC. Writing and bureaucracy are pivotal innovations
in this process and eventually formed the backbone of the pharaonic state.

The
aim of the project is to define an anthropological approach to the role of
administration in the formation of archaic states. Previous studies used
primarily textual data and have focused on the reconstruction of administration
as an operational system. It remained obscure, however, how bureaucracy penetrated
into prehistoric societies.

Materiality, including the theoretical
underpinnings of the concept, provides a good framework for modelling
administration as a diverse social practice on the interface between material
culture and writing. It helps understand the rooting of administration in the
use of objects and profile writing as a technique influenced and determined by the
physical world.

The project is
based on the documentation of a largely unpublished corpus of seals and seal
inscriptions from Hierakonpolis dated to the Early Dynastic period and the
early Old Kingdom (ca. 2700 BC). Most of
the material was excavated in 1897-1899 and is kept today by the Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University.

The analysis of inscriptions,
associated finds, and digging diaries will be set against the wider background
of developments in the Early Dynastic society in Egypt and discussed in the
context of comparative issues involved in debates on the formation of early
states. The project develops a social anthropological
view on Egyptian administration and opens the Egyptology-centred field to
neighbouring disciplines within and outside UCL.

It is relevant for
Egyptologists and archaeologists as well as for scholars from the social
sciences and historical disciplines interested in the formation of early states
and the penetration of writing in material worlds.